Wood stork's 'threatened' status causes controversy

The nation's premier advocate for wild birds supported authorities when they eased protections for bald eagles and other species in past years.

But the move last month by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to downgrade safeguards for wood storks, which are found mostly in Florida, has left the National Audubon Society fearing the big birds are being celebrated for a recovery that never happened.

"With the eagle, we figured out what the threat was, what was causing their decline, and we stopped that," said Audubon biologist Jason Lauritsen. "With the case of the wood stork, we really haven't done anything."

The U.S. Department of the Interior, which oversees the wildlife service, announced in late June the stork had been reclassified as threatened, a grade less dire than the endangered label declared for the bird in 1984.

"The down-listing of the wood stork from endangered to threatened demonstrates how the Endangered Species Act can be an effective tool to protect and recover imperiled wildlife from the brink of extinction," Interior Secretary Sally Jewel said.

As the only stork that breeds in North America, the birds have nothing to say about the matter. That's because they are mute.

Other wading birds in Florida are quick to communicate their moods. The wails and screams of limpkins can make a preschool playground seem quiet. When bothered, great blue herons will rise ponderously to fly away, complaining with harsh squawks.

By comparison, wood storks are calm and almost priestly in demeanor. They are black and white, featherless from the neck up and have an enormous bill.

Wood storks also are able to glide great distances effortlessly, riding updrafts of warm air.

The birds take advantage of that ability, hopscotching if necessary from the Everglades to the Carolinas for a place to nest.

For a rare bird long classified as endangered, the conspicuous storks turn up in Central Florida, foraging in ditches along major roads and in drainage ponds of suburban subdivisions.

Lauritsen said those birds are often biding their time, waiting for rains to hydrate wetlands enough to begin nesting — something they haven't always had to do.

The Everglades region south of Lake Okeechobee historically was the reliably wet heart of the wood-stork habitat. But ditching and draining of past decades wiped out vast amounts of shallow wetlands.

By the 1970s, the population was declining by 5 percent annually, reaching fewer than 5,000 nesting pairs and raising fears the bird was doomed.

To the surprise of biologists, wood storks began to migrate north for nesting places, including the Carolinas, and abandoning the Everglades.

One explanation is that former rice fields in South Carolina are being managed artificially so that water levels are hospitable to wading birds, including wood storks.

In justifying its reclassification of the stork, the Fish and Wildlife Service said that for the past decade — using counts that are averaged over several years — there have been 7,000 to 10,000 nesting pairs.

Those numbers exceed a goal set in 1997 that specifies 6,000 pairs as enough to revise the bird's status from endangered to threatened.

Lauritsen said too little is being done to restore and protect Florida's wetlands, including those in the Everglades, to fundamentally improve conditions for wood storks.

The number of nesting pairs may stem largely from a few years of unusually ideal weather in the 2000s that produced a bumper crop of birds.

"Unless the population continues to increase significantly, which it hasn't since 2009, we may very well just have a bubble in the population that eventually will go away."